Meet Michele DeFillippo

Michele DeFilippo has more than 50 years of experience in book publishing. Her company, 1106 Design, makes it easy for authors to release a top-quality book, keep control of it, and earn more money every time they sell a copy. Michele is on a mission to help authors ask the right questions to make informed decisions about publishing their books.

WEBSITE: ⁠1106 Design⁠

FREE! Publish Like Pros ⁠https://1106design.com/blog/

Full Transcript.

Don't Get Scammed: How to Protect Your Book With Michele De Fillippo

[00:00:00] Laura Williams: Today my guest is Michele DeFillippo. Michele has more than 50 years of experience in book publishing. Her company, 1106 Design, makes it easy for authors to release a top quality book, keep control of it, and earn more money every time they sell a copy. Michele is on a mission to help authors ask the right questions to make informed decisions about publishing their books, which is why she's the perfect person to talk to about ISBNs, barcodes, book rights, and copyrighting, which can be very confusing, particularly to first time authors.

Michele, how are you doing today?

[00:00:37] Michele DeFillippo: I'm doing great, Laura. Thank you so much for having me as a guest.

[00:00:41] Laura Williams: I belong to a lot of writing and publishing Facebook groups, and people have stories all the time about problems they've run into. And there's so much bad advice given to them on those groups that it's just mind-boggling. When self-publishing platforms offer free ISBNs, and to a new author that's like, oh, awesome, I can save some money here, but could you explain what the hidden trade-offs are of using a platform's free ISBN versus buying your own?

[00:01:11] Michele DeFillippo: Oh, absolutely. These companies offer a free ISBN. It's a sales pitch basically, and because they know that everybody likes free, and most of the time free is good. But in the case of ISBNs, that comes with a very big catch that authors need to be aware of, and that is that the ISBN identifies the publisher of the book.

So in most cases, anyone who offers you a free ISBN is more than likely offering you one of theirs, which means that they will become the registered publisher of your book. So when you hear or see free ISBN, I hope your mind immediately says red flag, because that's what it usually is.

[00:01:57] Laura Williams: No, it really is, and it can leave you in quite a pickle when you find out however long later that you're not the publisher of your book when you thought you were.

[00:02:08] Michele DeFillippo: That's right, and so what does that mean? If you expand on that a little bit, if they are the publisher of your book, that means they are going to get the sales reports from the retailer, they're going to get the payments from the retailers, and then they're gonna pay you a smaller amount usually called a royalty.

So it's not just a matter of why should I care who's the publisher of my book, it's what's gonna happen after that.

[00:02:33] Laura Williams: Right. So when an author's launching a single title, they're doing an e-book, a paperback, hardcover, maybe an audiobook, do they just need the one ISBN?

[00:02:46] Michele DeFillippo: No, actually each format of your book requires its own ISBN. If you think of the ISBN as if it were a model number, anything that's different about the product requires a different model number, right? So your paperback, your hardcover, your e-book, and your audiobook, each format of your book requires its own ISBN, and that's why most authors purchase a block of 10 ISBNs.

In the US, that's from Bowker, because a block of 10 ISBNs costs $295, whereas an individual ISBN costs $125 each. So you can think about what's best in your situation. But for most authors, a block of 10 is a better bargain.

Now, we've had some customers that, for example, only want a printed book for their friends and family, and they're not gonna offer it in a retail environment. That doesn't need an ISBN at all if it's only for your own personal use. But there are people out there who are only going to put out a print book, and so one ISBN would be fine. The trick with e-books is that if you're only gonna list your e-book on Amazon, you don't need an ISBN there because Amazon assigns its own ASIN number to Kindle e-books.

But if you're putting out an e-book and you wanna distribute it to other platforms beyond Amazon, then your e-book also needs an ISBN as well.

[00:04:14] Laura Williams: At what stage in the publication process should an author officially register their copyright with the US Copyright Office, and do they really need to do that?

[00:04:25] Michele DeFillippo: Yes. I recommend they do it, and what they should do is register the final version of their book, just as it's been released to the public, and they should do that within three months of publication. That gives you the greatest legal protection, because it allows you to make a claim if someone does violate your copyright.

Now, some authors want to register their manuscript before they're even done writing it and before they are making all kinds of changes to it, such as editing and proofreading and so forth. You really don't need to do that because copyright is automatically yours based on the fact that you wrote the book.

The reason to copyright it officially after that, within that three-month period, is so that you have the legal protection if someone violates it.

[00:05:14] Laura Williams: Okay. I know we always seem to come back to this subject, but I would like to know if you could explain a little bit how, if your work is sucked up into the AI sphere, how do you protect yourself if you have a copyright? I'm saying if you already have a copyright and your book is used to teach AI, is there a way to protect yourself?

[00:05:38] Michele DeFillippo: What has been happening is now that we all create documents digitally, every keystroke from everybody is being sucked up into AI without our permission. Now hopefully they're not capturing what we do word for word. They're just distilling it, they're paraphrasing it, and somehow gathering information and giving us the answers that we all love. But copyright protects the actual word for word version that you as the publisher have published.

[00:06:07] Laura Williams: I know that AI work is, at this time, you're not able to copyright it, but I was reading an article right before we came on the air about an issue with YouTube. If you do not go in and manually set your videos each time to say, "I do not want anybody to make a remix of this video," then anybody can. So YouTube's terms of service is basically you're giving away your copyright by not clicking that button.

[00:06:43] Michele DeFillippo: Wow. That's an interesting thing I did not know. I know that you cannot copyright text word for word that is generated by AI, right? I did have a conversation with a potential customer about that. He contacted us and said he had AI write his entire book, and the first thing we told him was, "You better not claim that you wrote that book, because you can't copyright AI text." You can use it to learn, you can use it to plan your book, you can use it just like you might use references in a library to craft your book, but you have to write it.

You have to change that text in substantial ways in order to claim that it's yours, and that's just common sense really, right?

[00:07:27] Laura Williams: It's so interesting because how AI has become such a touchpoint for all of us. It's affecting so much of our lives, and not just because we're in the author business. I think if we were outside of this business, we would still have these issues because it's affecting the way we work, the way we live, the way we do things, the way we pay our bills. There's so much AI that we use, we don't even know we're using AI.

[00:07:55] Michele DeFillippo: I'm 20% worried about it. At the moment, I kind of love using it. I love getting the quick and thorough answers. I mean, who doesn't? It has crashed website visits. People are no longer visiting websites and digging for answers. They're just getting their answer from AI now, so that's kind of interesting. We're on the bleeding edge of a brand-new thing here.

[00:08:18] Laura Williams: Yeah, it's interesting you brought that up because my business that I actually do is I build websites and I do podcast production, and I am trying to build and define a service to where I go in and audit websites to bring them up into 2026, 2027 standards to not just have SEO, search engine optimization, but also to have GEO and AEO, which is AI optimization.

Because the different types of AI are being asked questions, and they're what go into Google and search for the answers. You have to make your content more where they can find it, and that means that you should ask more questions in your content. And then they'll say, "Oh, here's this question." They have the answer.

[00:09:14] Michele DeFillippo: Yeah. In fact we just had our website reconfigured so that it would be more visible to AI for the reasons you just stated. Because otherwise, it looks for information in certain ways, and if it doesn't find it, it doesn't recommend you.

[00:09:29] Laura Williams: Yeah, I've come across a few articles since then that are really saying... Well, actually, I came across one day before yesterday that said that the publishers are pushing authors to do more in-person, organic type marketing because they are struggling within the book marketing system with this search engine, or the GEO optimization situation. Things aren't being found as easily as they were, and it's really... Search results naturally dip this kind of time of year anyways, and we're in an off election year. You know what I mean? So I mean, it dips anyways, but the AI's given us quite a hit.

[00:10:13] Michele DeFillippo: It is changing everything. In fact, I would say two years ago we used to get a few people who said they found us on the internet, and then there were other referral sources that people would mention when they found us. Now it is, I would say, 99.9% people say they found us on the internet or through AI, right? I think internet means AI now, right? Because you're right there on the top of the web search page.

[00:10:39] Laura Williams: Especially if you use Google. I've said this many times on the podcast, I use a lot of AI in my business and for the podcast. There's no way that me as one person could take care of all the things I need to take care of, and I mean task-oriented type things, if I didn't do that.

Like in my video editing, I edit by script, and I use AI to help me find words that don't belong in there, and to do different cuts. It just makes it so much faster because before, my production for an hour-long podcast would've been like three and a half, four hours. Now it's so much less.

But at the same time, there's still a lot of things that I'm scared of with AI. I had a guest on recently who has a system called True Origin, and True Origin starts from the minute you start writing, it starts to keep track of everything so that if you, at the end of what you're doing, you could say, "This is all me."

That doesn't mean like spellcheck and things like that. It means that you didn't use AI to do the writing. We need that type of tool to be able to put on our books, no AI was involved here, and have it not just be us saying it, but actually have a validation.

[00:11:58] Michele DeFillippo: It's sort of interesting, because now we're all getting very hooked on AI for the reasons you just mentioned, and now they're gonna start to monetize it, so we should enjoy the honeymoon while we've got it.

[00:12:11] Laura Williams: No, that's true. That's why I've been working to try to figure out which tools are best for what I do. And that way I know when it becomes more expensive, I can make better decisions.

[00:12:23] Michele DeFillippo: Yeah. We actually did a little test in the last couple of weeks of advertising on ChatGPT, but I know as a small business, I know at some point it will get too expensive, right? Because it always does. That's what happened with all pay-per-click advertising. It's interesting. Maybe AI is gonna become the next utility. You'll pay for electricity and water and AI as part of your monthly bills.

[00:12:49] Laura Williams: Hopefully, they make the internet a utility before they do that.

[00:12:53] Michele DeFillippo: Well, they're gonna have to, I think. You almost can't exist without it anymore.

[00:12:57] Laura Williams: You can't. And a lot of people don't have access, whether it's financial or a location, they really suffer because they don't have the internet. And that needs to be addressed.

[00:13:08] Michele DeFillippo: Yeah. And some people just don't know. I have a friend who's in her 80s, and she's just boggled by the whole thing, and she doesn't wanna learn, but she's becoming more and more isolated because of that.

[00:13:20] Laura Williams: No, absolutely. That's a problem there, too. With the younger people, everything they do is on the internet.

[00:13:27] Michele DeFillippo: The part that scares me a little bit is that's an enormous power to have over us, right? You almost don't have a choice. Everything you do is internet related in some way.

[00:13:39] Laura Williams: You can't even apply for a job anymore without it.

[00:13:42] Michele DeFillippo: My friend objects to the fact that they wanna deliver her bank statements online, but I told her, at some point they're just gonna say they won't mail you your bank statements. In fact, she might have reached that point, and so now she just doesn't look at her statements, which is really dangerous.

[00:13:58] Laura Williams: Let me ask you, what are some other things that, particularly newer authors, may take shortcuts or not take the time to learn enough about the publishing and self-publishing business, that they can really get themselves in some trouble?

[00:14:12] Michele DeFillippo: Oh, authors can get themselves in trouble in so many ways, but really in the Facebook groups you have people who really don't know anything giving advice to authors who don't know anything, and that's where the trouble just starts to multiply. One of the biggest issues we see is the complete misunderstanding of what design is, and even what editing is sometimes.

There's that do-it-yourself message that has been responsible for just an avalanche of poorly produced books. That's where it begins, and then also on how do you print and distribute your book? The independent publishing, self-publishing, the original idea was that the author was the publisher, but now we're back to authors thinking they need a publisher, and that's going wrong in so many ways too.

You don't need a publisher. You can be and should be the publisher of your book.

[00:15:07] Laura Williams: Right. But at the same time, you have to have sense to know what you can and can't do.

[00:15:11] Michele DeFillippo: I think some authors think they have to have a publisher to provide the services that they need to produce a book because they recognize that they don't know how to do it. But there are other entities like my company that provide those author services without taking control of your book and without sharing your revenue from sales like a publisher does.

[00:15:32] Laura Williams: Right. Yeah, and that's important because sometimes you can do quite a bit of it, but maybe you can't... You don't know how to do the formatting and the cover design. To be able to find a company you can rely on that can offer those services is so helpful because I think a lot of people when they start looking at self-publishing, they start with the mindset they have to do it all.

[00:15:56] Michele DeFillippo: I know, and that's impossible.

[00:15:58] Laura Williams: And that's so overwhelming.

[00:16:00] Michele DeFillippo: You can't be good at everything.

[00:16:03] Laura Williams: No. But at the same time, there's so many different pieces, and unless you're getting good advice, it could turn into an expensive nightmare.

[00:16:13] Michele DeFillippo: And it often does, and we see the horror stories online, and it's unfortunate because authors care very deeply about their book.

They often work for years on their manuscript, and then everything goes sideways on them and it's like they're probably left asking, "What happened? I thought I did everything I was supposed to do." So there's a lot of people out there just blatantly taking advantage of authors too.

[00:16:36] Laura Williams: I don't remember all the details, but I was talking to someone that they had a client that had tried to publish with one company and ended up spending $10,000 for pretty much nothing before they went to her company to get basically the same services for a lot less and actually get the services and get the book published. But there's a lot of companies out there that really are not in it to help an author.

[00:17:09] Michele DeFillippo: Oh, I know, and we get the calls every week too that, you know, the narrative out there is you should just get your cover done on Fiverr and you should just format the book yourself using either Microsoft Word or Vellum or Atticus or whatever else they're promoting now.

But that doesn't produce a good book. And so rule number one, if you aim to be in the publishing business versus publishing as a hobby, is that you have to put out a quality product. Now, if you're publishing as a hobby, it probably doesn't matter. You could do it any way you want, because your friends and your family will love it. But if you intend to sell the book, then the bar is higher and you need to produce a market quality book.

[00:17:51] Laura Williams: It's just like any other business. You have your goods and services that have to be quality and have to meet the need of the public. It's the same thing with creating a book. So often you see people cutting... The one place that you see people cutting, hiring somebody that drives me insane, is in editing. Because they don't understand that proofreading is not editing. And so they say, "Oh, I can proofread my own book." First of all, you can't, because you don't see the mistakes as you should. But editing is different than proofreading.

[00:18:25] Michele DeFillippo: Yeah, and that's an area of misinformation too, because sometimes authors will be attracted to a low-cost editor, but that editor isn't really editing, their proofreading. They're not working at the level they should to fine-tune your text and polish it up the way it should be. That's the problem when people buy on price, right? And a lot of indie authors, they don't do enough research about what the professional level services do cost, because editing at that level takes an awful lot of time. It takes a lot more time than just going through and finding the typos. In any business, you get what you pay for. Nobody can offer you more than you pay for. So if you set an unrealistic budget at the start and you say, "I wanna publish my book, but I don't wanna spend more than $2,500," then you go out and you find vendors who will work within your budget.

You're already shooting yourself in the foot. What you should do is find out what does it cost to produce a quality book, and then save up until you can afford it, right? And that's how you get off on the right foot when you begin any business. I don't care if you're selling donuts or books, you have to do it right because your customers are gonna recognize the difference.

[00:19:41] Laura Williams: And how long do I need to fund this business until it starts to make money?

[00:19:47] Michele DeFillippo: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:19:49] Laura Williams: And that's how you have to approach the writing business. And there's ways you can bring in money. You can write a novella and get that to market faster than you can your whole book series. There's ways that you could bring money in and maybe stretch out into other income streams to bring in money before you get out there and publish. You just have to be strategic.

[00:20:10] Michele DeFillippo: Yeah, and that's good advice. And every aspect of the book preparation process is important, right? Because the cover is the first thing people see. So if you go to market with a cover that looks self-published, people might not stop and learn more about it, and they might never get to see the editing.

So you really have to think of it holistically. And if you can't afford it, then save up until you can. That is always my advice. There are some people out there that will recommend that authors go into debt to publish a book. I never, ever say that. Do not go into publishing with the rent money. It's a risky business. It's maybe one of the riskiest businesses around, right? And there's no guarantee that you're gonna sell books. So by all means, be cautious in what you spend, but understand that you do have to spend a certain amount of money in order to produce a good book.

[00:21:02] Laura Williams: Also, if you have a lot of friends and family that are willing to support you, if you have a following that cares about what you do, you can also go through Kickstarter to raise money. But you cannot go through Kickstarter to raise money if you have no platform at all. You're gonna waste your time and your effort that you could be doing something else to make money.

[00:21:25] Michele DeFillippo: On the crowdfunding platforms, you also have to have a compelling story, right? You can't go on there and just say, "Please pay for my book because I don't want to." There has to be a reason. People have to get behind your message. Did you have a unique experience? It's gotta be something that captures a donor's imagination too.

[00:21:43] Laura Williams: Charlotte Pierce with Pierce Press has an author, Oleg Veretskiy, who is literally on the front lines of the Ukrainian War. And he wrote a trilogy. They're just beautiful books. The illustrations are amazing.

They have done two different Kickstarters. They did one for the first book, and they just finished up the second one for the second book of the trilogy, but this one was specifically for the audiobook. And they funded in hours.

[00:22:16] Michele DeFillippo: That's great.

[00:22:16] Laura Williams: But that was because they had the story and the platform to do that.

[00:22:22] Michele DeFillippo: But there's another thing with some of these platforms that what you should maybe be prepared to do is, some of these platforms you don't get any of the contributions unless you meet your goal. So set a realistic goal. And let's say you get 80% there, be prepared to make up the difference with your credit card, right? So that you don't lose all of that effort and all of that time, because a crowdfunding platform takes a lot of your time to monitor, too. You have to participate. You just can't set it up and disappear.

[00:22:52] Laura Williams: I work with Charlotte and she's one of my clients, and Oleg's one of my clients as well. The first one was so much harder because she did not have as big a team at that time, so a lot of it she was trying to do, and she's a very busy woman to start with. She has other projects and she has a lot of community commitments.

So it was hard. The second one, she had a team that she used, and they helped to set the plan out and everything, and she said everything ran so much smoother. So even though you're trying to raise money for a service, sometimes you need a service provider to help you through that.

[00:23:32] Michele DeFillippo: That's actually kind of plays into my whole message, that with the do-it-yourself message, the first time you do anything it's never any good, right? If you're gonna put your book out there and you expect and want to encourage people to buy it, make sure it's a good product, and that takes experience and know-how.

[00:23:49] Laura Williams: And also realize that you're probably not gonna make your money back on the first book. Sometimes it takes a while to get started. I like to be able to highlight these things on this show because talking to people such as you, who have had clients and friends, and yourself being in business, that have seen the successes and also seen the real tragedy of people being taken advantage of, and being able to tell these stories is so important. They're not only educational, but they're also validating. So if you're one of those people that are in the middle of making one of those mistakes, you don't feel like it's so much of a failure. It's a learning experience, because other people have done the same thing.

[00:24:33] Michele DeFillippo: I've been in business a long time, and I've never seen so many businesses actively deceiving customers, right? That seems to be rampant in today's publishing industry. It's just flat out wrong.

[00:24:45] Laura Williams: It is. And I mean, it's from everything, even in your email inbox. The AI bots that are trying to make you feel like they're some famous author who wants to work with you, or a publishing company that wants to publish your book.

[00:24:58] Michele DeFillippo: It's unfortunate because it makes everyone suspicious of everyone else, you know? Instead of being able to work together and trust people unless you see some red flags, otherwise it's the opposite now. Now you have to distrust everyone and hope that you run into a good person. It makes it really hard for honest businesses to actually get anywhere, because you're immediately distrusted.

[00:25:22] Laura Williams: Especially if they're newer businesses, because they don't have that experience behind them. Like your business, you've been in this a while. It's hard to start a business and build up that type of reputation.

[00:25:32] Michele DeFillippo: Some of the publishing entities that are the bad players, they change their name often so they seem like new businesses, but they're the same old villains behind the scenes.

[00:25:41] Laura Williams: Right. Yeah. So I think as an author, you have to really investigate the company that you're gonna do business with, and ask the right questions. You have to really get in there and ask the right questions and work with your service provider. That doesn't mean you have to be an awful person. Business people appreciate business people. If you approach somebody with a business mindset, "This is what I wanna do, this is how I wanna do it, I need to know what you have to offer me," that's appreciated. So don't feel that you shouldn't do that.

[00:26:11] Michele DeFillippo: No, and I think most legitimate business owners expect to be questioned and expect to be able to explain what they offer and are happy to do so. I think AI is gonna have a boomerang effect.

I think personal service and being able to talk to humans is gonna become much more valuable, because we're already getting prospects who come to us and say, "I wanna be able to talk to somebody." They're putting that on our intake form.

So I think there's an awful lot of companies out there already that are just turning everything into a robotic process, and I don't think anybody wants that.

[00:26:46] Laura Williams: When you brought up this, it made me think, like, just regular customer service, the phone company or wherever. So they started where they were shipping all their customer service overseas. Now they're doing it all with AI, so you can't really talk to anybody unless you go through a gazillion hoops.

[00:27:05] Michele DeFillippo: It feels like it. Especially when the loop they've put you in doesn't give you the opportunity to explain what you're really interested in.

[00:27:15] Laura Williams: But companies that take the time to answer their phone and talk to you, they're gonna be the companies for the future.

[00:27:23] Michele DeFillippo: I hope you're right, because that's the way we're gonna operate. That said, for smaller companies, there is an issue that it's best to schedule a call on the person's calendar if you can, right? Just calling and interrupting is really hard for small businesses to deal with because we're working. We're not just sitting here waiting. We don't have a call center like the big companies do, or maybe the big companies don't even have a call center anymore. Who knows?

[00:27:46] Laura Williams: I have a serious problem with that. I watch my email and my phone too much, so I respond to my clients, and they'll tell you they love my response time because I respond almost immediately. But that means I stopped whatever I'm doing. I need to be more cognizant of that time and chill out because I've noticed that's what I'm doing, and sometimes it complicates a project, especially when I lose my flow. My brain's in 10,000 places, and now it's in this one, and I lost my flow, you know?

[00:28:22] Michele DeFillippo: Oh, yeah. I hear you. There are days when three-quarters of my day is spent in my email inbox, and I say to myself, "This is crazy," but what do you do about it? I don't know.

I heard a conversation way back when about how Steve Jobs was horrified at what the iPhone did to the business world. Because he created this expectation of an instant response without understanding that's what was gonna happen when he invented the iPhone.

[00:28:50] Laura Williams: You worry that they're gonna get upset with you, or their problem maybe is really a problem that needs to be addressed right now. Or it could be that they go to somebody else. So it's, I mean, you kinda just have to, but at the same time, it's so disruptive.

[00:29:08] Michele DeFillippo: I think in that regard, a little bit of automation is fine, right? I mean, because you can't spend your time just saying, "I received your message," all day long. You have to get the work done sometime.

[00:29:20] Laura Williams: And I do like the idea of, like we talked before, about using AI to help with tasks like that. So in other words, just send them a message saying that, "I am unavailable right now. I will get back to you within, you know, three hours," whatever, something like that. I like that. I think that that would be appreciated, but I don't know. It's such a mess.

[00:29:40] Michele DeFillippo: Well, it's a matter of degree, right? Nobody wants to speak only to a robot. Say they don't plan the message tree properly, right? They should, at some point, allow you to exit and say, "I wanna speak to a representative."

[00:29:55] Laura Williams: Those are the companies that are usually more customer-centric, as opposed to something like your electric company, that you've gotta get electric from them anyways. It's ridiculous.

Tell me more about what your company does, what services you provide.

[00:30:12] Michele DeFillippo: My company is 1106design.com. That's where you can find us, and if you go to our website and check us out, you will get to download for free my little booklet called Publish Like the Pros, and it covers a lot of things we talked about here, and ways that authors can stay out of trouble and begin the publishing process and wind up with a good book at the end of that process.

We've been in business since 2001. We've done about 4,000 books since that time, and I've been in the publishing business personally since 1972. So if you come to us, you're gonna get all the benefit of all that accumulated experience.

[00:30:53] Laura Williams: Michele, thank you so much for joining me today. To learn more about the podcast and to sign up to be the first to learn when new episodes are up, visit thewritingbiz.com. Don't forget to hit like, share, and subscribe. Also, please leave a review. Every little bit helps to help authors find this podcast.

Until next time, take what you've learned and put it to work in your own writing biz.